Age of a backlink

[pjain]

Can someone help me out with a tool that could tell us the age of an indexed backlinks by google, yahoo & MSN.
I mean when was the backlink indexed by which search engine.

[dazzlindonna]

Don't know of one.

[eKstreme]

The data is not publicly available as far as I know. You see, search engines cache pages as they visit them. So you could look at the date of the cache and see if the link is there or not. That will tell you that the search engine "knows" about the link, but since the cache gets over-written, we wouldn't be able to tell if the link was found in the previous caches or not.

I'd love to be shown to be wrong though

Pierre

[jadibones]

I'm not sure that this method is 100% accurate, but you can use google alerts to let you know when links show up for a domain.

Just enter this in the alert:
link:domain.com

They will email you whenever they index a new backlink.

[SEO_AM]

That would be for any NEW links, not the link date of existing links. I am not aware of any tool or method to check age of links.

[mvandemar]

You might be able to write a tool that would compare pages that have the links on them to what is stored in The Internet Archive (www.archive.org). This would only be for a sampling of pages though, as not every page (or indeed every site) is listed, and there are usually huge gaps between when pages are stored. What a tool like that would be useful for would be saying this like "Analysis shows that suchandsuch site has links going as far back as this date." kind of thing. Don't know if that would be useful though. Would be interesting anyways.

-Michael

[pjain]

nt is whenever you takeup an SEO assignment usually it goes through different hands before it usually lands into yours. Such a tool would be helpful to understand who did what. So when we have no such tool available, I think this would be a good innovation for programmers to takeup.

[jadibones]

I totally forgot about PubSub. It does what you are looking for, but only has a reange of 1 month.

One other big limitation is that it only shows links from sites that have an XML feed, (Mostly blogs and forums)

However, It is still pretty awesome, and not too far from what you were looking for.

Check the PubSub stats for SEORefugee.com

[pjain]

Thanks Jadibones,
Lets hope we would explore one such tool soon.
Thanks for PubSub, however it is'nt what we are looking for.

[katherineeobryan]

The age of the backlink is most likely given value by Google when computing for the PageRank of websites and its web pages. The age reveals that the links are not acquired all at once. It also reveals the relevancy of the website especially when the backlinks are on for quite some time already.